Post Mont Tremblant Transition: Moving On with the Rest of Your Season

2014 Ironman® Mont Tremblant will be remembered for the unusually cool temperatures all day and wind that dominated the bike! Team Endurance Nation will remember it as the day we had five, FIVE!, folks qualify for the World Championships in Kona.

Now that Mont Tremblant is in the books, it’s time to start focusing on the rest of your season. And if you’re like most age groupers, the completion of your Ironman® has left a gaping whole in your life — the event provided a focus and urgency to most of your daily activities…and then POOF, that focus goes away, leaving you in a pretty solid post-race funk.

Most triathletes try to fill that void by often jumping right back into the familiarity of solid, consistent training. But there’s more to this game than just working out. There’s training to be fit, and then there’s training to improve.

Inside Endurance Nation we spend a great deal of time helping age group triathletes reach their peak potential by making sense of the big-picture element of their training. We call it the Triathlon Season RoadMap™ and it’s our approach to stacking races, training events and your general training to help you maximize your fitness on a schedule that fits your life.

Taking A Mental Break

There’s recovery and then there’s RECOVERY. You will want to be active, but you need to be aware of the downstream cost of getting back too work too soon. Your body will let you know if it isn’t ready for the work of training by putting you to sleep in the middle of your day or making you eat everything in sight after a 30-minute easy run.

But your brain is another story. All it remembers is the endorphins of the finish line, and very little of the cost associated with all of the training and hard work you did to get there. In other words — your tiny lizard brain wants to workout and race. But you can’t…not yet. You need four weeks where you stay active, but you don’t have any goals. Workouts where you aren’t pushing yourself mentally, but you are letting the workouts come to you.

Our guide for successfully transitioning from your biggest race to the rest of your triathlon season.

Setting Late Season Goals

Since Mont Tremblant is an August race, odds are most of your season is behind you at this point. Your next big block for training is most likely the OutSeason, which kicks off in November. Between now and then, you have the chance to have some fun and keep your fitness rolling for the rest of the season.

If your Mont Tremblant race day was less than good, you might be interested in scheduling a revenge race. If you had a solid day, perhaps you want to put a half marathon on the calendar or a similar running event just as a carrot to keep yourself in shape. Along the way you can also schedule in any epic cycling adventures you want; these are great ways to build your fitness year-round without putting your body in a state of excessive fatigue or in danger.